Lost Boy finds change through struggle

When Awer Bul visited his former refugee camp in Kenya, he saw that conditions had deteriorated even more than when he lived there six years earlier.

Bul was a victim of the Sudanese Civil War and lived in the wild with other lost children. These children are often referred to as the Lost Boys because they were orphaned or displaced from their families during the war.

Three years later, Bul found his way to a Kenyan refugee camp where food and water were scarce. Upon returning to the camp in 2006, Bul said he hoped conditions had improved since he left in 2000. He remembers a lack of security, and receiving one meal a day and water every seven hours.

“Three days before we came to the camp, there was a shooting. People (were) being killed by tribal people,” Bul said. “There’s no protection . so you can do whatever you want and get away with it.”

Bul, a painting and printmaking and kinetic imaging double major, has made it his mission to help the refugees in the camp he was once part of. His efforts include starting the Awer G. Bul Art Mission through which Bul goes back to the camp, holds artist workshops and helps develop the skills of intermediate to advanced self-taught artist. He then sells the paintings in the United States and returns the money to the students so they can support themselves.

Bul said he believes regardless of skill level, the artists in the refugee camp have detailed and realistic stories they can pour into their art, just as he did. He started experimenting with basal art forms as a child-drawing stick figures on the wall and making clay models of the cattle he cared for. When the war arrived, he used art to express what he was going through.

“There was no proper way for me to document what happened in war,” Bul said. “I started to draw pictures of what I had witnessed during the war time.”

His art skills eventually made it possible for him to leave the refugee camp and receive an education in Richmond. Just as he has received an education, Bul works on providing a similar opportunity for children in Sudan through the United Families for Sudan, an organization he created to help build schools with access to clean water and farming tools so families can re-learn to work after years of encampment.

In addition to his work with the United Families for Sudan, Bul premiered a documentary Sunday at the Virginia Holocaust Museum. Approximately 500 people attended the screening of “Blood is the Same.” The documentary showcased the attention he would like to bring to the deterioration of refugee camps.

Mawut Mawut, also a former Lost Boy, said the documentary accurately depicted the situation in the camps.

“It presents the exact problem in the camps,” Mawut said.

Mawut said he was reminded of the primitive materials children use in the camps when he saw a scene of children playing soccer with a ball of rags. Mawut recalls doing the same in Africa-he didn’t play with a real soccer ball until he arrived in the U.S. –

Attendants Fran and Wally Hudgins said they were not aware of the situation in the camps until they saw the film, and were impacted by the lack of water and food available to refugees.

“It’s a shocking way of living,” Wally Hudgins said. “(They) live primitively, day to day.”

Bul plans to continue to bring awareness to the situation in Sudan through his various organizations and projects.

“(This is) not just to support my life, but to show the people who are (in Sudan) that I was once part of them. I am here now and I haven’t forgotten them,” Bul said.

Despite the hardships he has endured, Bul still has found happiness within.

“God has not created happiness and said, ‘Everybody have it.’ ” Bul said. “It’s something you create within you. You think about it and see where to find it.”

Each week, the Spectrum Section selects a talented student from the School of the Arts (music, dance, theater and visual) and showcases his or her achievements both in and around the VCU community. Do you want your name and work in The CT? E-mail spectrum@commonwealthtimes.com for consideration.